Google’s radar – An image portraying Google’s stance on spammers

A wonderful presentation of what Google feels about Search engine spammers. This image shows some of the spam tactics that are in Google’s Radar. We all know Google mostly knows all the major spam tactics used in black hat SEO industry. This image is a good example of it.

Plagiarism – Issue with plagiarism by a webmasterworld member

A webmaster world members shows his concerns with paraphrasing of his contents by an authority site.

He says
“My wife and I have a merchant site that we’ve worked very hard on since 2004. We created it to sell our unique niche product. We have done a lot of research and my wife has written a lot of unique content. We are proud of what we have accomplished.
Life took a detour and for the past year and a half, we’ve pretty much let the site run on autopilot (have not added any new content or product or kept up with the industry). Fortunately, our site and reputation have not been damaged, and we have sold out of almost all of our merchandise.
We’ve recently begun working on the site again. An authority site has sprung up in our industry and is beating us in Google. Many of our articles have been devalued in Google. I started studying this new authority site and have discovered that much of it is a paraphrasing of our content. I’ve tried the Google quoted search and cannot turn anything up, but on manual searches of this and our site, there is not doubt they have copied our stuff.
I have a few questions about what I can do about this…
1. Is this Plagiarism?
2. Is there an easier way to detect this without having to manually finding it all myself?
3. Instead of, or in addition to following the traditional steps to getting the content removed, I’d like to post screenshots of my content and the plagiarized site to discredit them. I’m really upset about this. What are your thoughts? “

This thread has some very good replies from industry experts its worth the read.

http://www.webmasterworld.com/content_copywriting/3653270.htm

A cartoon on Search Engines Love fresh Content

We are adding cartoons twice a week, this is the 2nd cartoon of this week you will see the next Search Engine related cartoon on Monday,

For more cartoons please visit

http://www.searchenginegenie.com/seo-comics.htm

http://www.searchenginegenie.com/seo-comics-1.html

http://www.searchenginegenie.com/seo-comics-2.html

Jill whalen and the nitty gritty of copywriting cartoon

Jill Whalen, most of the people in SEO industry will know Jill and her in-famous High Rankings forum. Jill is famous for her good copywriting skills and SEO skills. She has written lot of Newsletters and some of them are very famous ones.

Here is Jill Whalen ready to Teach copywriting in her class.

Random text / Rotating text is it good for Search Engines?

I am sure you would have wondered whether showing random text to search engines are a good index and whether it helps in search engine benefit.

As fas as i know i don’t see any special search engine benefit for this i have seen many blogs that are updated few times a day so mostly the search engines don’t see the content they saw today the next day. Ofcourse this page can also be considered showing random text but search engines love those blogs since they are constantly updated.

So random contents as long as it is done for Good reasons will be good for search engines. I recommend not to abuse it since there are people who use methods like Cloaking where one type of content is showed to the search engines and an other type of content is showed to the users. Also remember the random contents are unique contents instead of contents syndicated through feeds. When you are using feeds to show random contents i am sure the same content is already shown up in a different site so there won’t be any benefit from it.

What will you ask a SEO firm

There is a discussion going on highrankings forum about questions that needs to be asked to a SEO firm . People keep asking this questions and i have already covered about this in my previous postings here. The SEO thread starter asks what is the best question to be asked.

Well there are 1000s of SEOs who call them companies, 1000s of SEO teams who call them companies. So what makes a good SEO company well first research what is the expertise of the company how many employees they have, how many work full time in SEO etc.

Here are some valid questions you can ask.

1. What is the most competitive keyword your company has ranked and how long it has stayed or is staying in Google top 10 rankings?
2. Can you explain some of the methods you use to gain ranking for our sites, is there something against search engine guidelines?
3. Give us some of your clients who are doing great in search engines, getting maximum traffic with good ROI and is with you for more than 2 years?
4. What is your client retention rate and success rate in search engine rankings?
5. What is success when it comes to search rankings?

I can imagine more but these will be on my top priority list

SEOmoz can i have an optout / Unsubscribe link please

Sorry to say i am not happy about commercial emails from SEOmoz, When i joined i never found any option where i opt-in for their commercial emails. This is the recent email I got from them

“You may have seen our launch of our new SEO Video Training Series on the
blog last week. Dozens of people took advantage of our special
introductory pricing and the feedback on the series has been fantastic. We want
to make sure everybody who wants to learn sound SEO fundamentals can get their
hands on this awesome training product, so we’ve got a special offer for
you.
We promised we wouldn’t offer the ridiculous Introductory Price of
nearly 40% off again, but here’s what we can do: make it more affordable than
ever for you to get the SEO Video Training Series at the PRO Member price of
$199 ($200 off of the Retail Price of $399)…
Until Saturday, May 3rd, you
can get the complete SEO Video Training Series AND 1-Year of SEOmoz PRO
Membership for only $499! Purchased Separately, these items would
cost $798. Even with the PRO discount on the Video Series, you’d still pay $648
for both. Look at it either way you want, you’re saving a minimum of $99!
To
take advantage of this awesome, limited-time offer, simply go to the SEOmoz
Store and add a 1-Year SEOmoz PRO Membership and The SEO Video Training Series
to your shopping cart, then use the Coupon Code COMBO50 during checkout to
receive your special price on this great package.
Cheers, The SEOmoz
Team
PS-Remember, this offer is only available for Three Days, until
Saturday, May 3rd!
PPS-If you’re thinking of attending SMX Advanced in our
hometown of Seattle, PRO Membership will get you 10% off (early bird rates still
apply!) as well as an invite to our incredible party (check out what happened
last year)!
This email was sent by: SEOmoz4314 Roosevelt Way NE Seattle, WA,
98105, USA”
Update profile:

Ok i dont see an opt out link in this email. When i click on update profile i am taken to the login page where i have to find the email settings and then i need to remove tick to opt out. Why do i need to do this? . I think SEOmoz should ask whether i opt in for commercial emails from them when i register.

i don’t want to receive couple of commercial emails and then run and find a way to opt-out,

Thanks for understanding
Search Engine Genie.

Digitalpoint Forums Down due to overactivity

Today when I visited Digitalpoint forums I got the following Error,

“
Database error
The database has encountered a problem.
Please try the following:
Load the page again by clicking the Refresh button in your web browser.
Open the forums.digitalpoint.com home page, then try to open another page.
The forums.digitalpoint.com forum technical staff have been notified of the error, though you may contact them if the problem persists.
We apologise for any inconvenience.”

Its very rare to see such popular forum go down. I feel its mostly due to over activity recently Google made a Pagerank update. Most of the visitors in Digital point forum are very addictive and passionate about Pagerank updates. I feel this pagerank update made a crazy impact on their server and it let to database crash.

I think we should be hearing from soon about this,

Search Engine Genie,

launching inhouse team SEO challenge

We have about 8 teams working on SEO, Currently we are organizing a small inhouse SEO challenge. The team that comes up with the best tactics that brings maximum attention to the client site/sites they work on will get a treat in one of the best local Star Hotel and one day outing to a favourite play they choose. We are running this challenge for a month and results to be announced around May 25th. May the best team win.

Tactics like Controversial articles, top level quality attractive articles, amazing tools, new innovative ideas are all allowed. We are waiting to see who is the best SEO team in our company. All teams have already started working hard and are doing lot trial and error ideas to come up with the best strategies.

Wish our teams good luck

SEG

Most recent SEO related Informative Thread in Google Groups.

I have already read this thread in detail but i keep reading it again and again. Just one single thread and it has ton of information from some of the best Search Engine Experts. Especially I enjoy the SEO expert’s friendliness with Search Engines. Most of the forums i see there will be a huge crowd ready to bash Google. But this thread is so much fun to read just because it has real valuable information from experts like Matt Cutts, John Muller, Aaron Pratt, JLH, SEO101 etc.

I recommend everyone to read this thread and understand how a webmaster was able to over come his penalty and get back his ranking in Google. Accept you are wrong and Google is always ready to forgive. We had a client who came to us with a penalized site. They bought links from TLA and Google has detected those links and imposed some sort of penalty. We reviewed the site and recommended client to remove all paid links and file a re inclusion. You know what his answer was?
“Google is the looser since it has banned his site. Google is unlucky because it doesn’t have his company site in their index” . Come on client if not your site Google has millions of sites to index and they are not worried if one aggressive site is not in their index even though it might be world’s best. It took us lot of time to convince him to clean up paid BLs. Finally he did but still he was not ready to give up his Ego and submit re inclusion. We on behalf of him filed a re inclusion and finally the site came back to Good top rankings. He was all praises for us but the truth we didn’t do anything all we did was explain in detail mistakes that was previously done on site and said that it will never be repeated again. Google accepted our words and included the site so lesson learnt if you want Google to send free traffic for your site play by their guidelines if you going to spam them face the consequences.

Read that thread again its better than my voice